BENGALURU: Have you noticed how the villain always has the upper hand? In books and in movies, the enemy has more power, the better brains, the better army, good fashion sense, and a nice house. They have it all. The story is no different in videogames. In fact, it is worse here because we experience defeat by the villain first-hand.It is here, that the game “Carrion” extends its disgusting tentacle to shake hands with us. In this game, we ARE the evil.
In Carrion, we play as a vicious human-eating, greasy monster. It is a platformer, playable on the PC and Xbox. While the gameplay is on a two-dimensional environment, the experience itself has more depth. The puny humans are nothing at the might of this amorphous, ever-growing beast. It is ironic how heart-warming the slurps and cracks get.
Since most of the game involves the monster feasting on the humans to grow in size, it is only right that the length of the game is also bite-sized. It is an ideal weekend-play, especially because it is easy to finish, and does not require complete concentration. The progression is based on a combination of solving puzzles, and having a mental memory of the game’s map. As you move and explore the alien facility, newer rooms and more complex puzzles emerge. The monster gets newer and better skills to unlock more rooms in the facility.
Carrion has no dialogue, and a rather feeble backstory, so I decided to visualise a motivation for myself. I wanted to redeem me from the guilt of mercilessly destroying a research station. Perhaps ‘blobby’ (the disgusting monster that I played as), is really a kind monster. It wants nothing but to protect the scientist humans from a worse fate taking over the research facility. Blobby merely helps the humans by destroying drones, which would have otherwise fried their brains and made their careers obsolete.
In all seriousness, this game is light, simple, and a great stress-buster. Really. Just watching the humans scram while Blobby echolocates is entertainment enough.It is available for free with the Xbox game pass. A rating of 1,000 becquerels for this easy-to-digest, radioactive mess of a game.
Anusha Ganapathi
@quofles
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)